If Chefs Are the New Rock Stars, Then Danny Bowien Is Eddie Van Halen

As a teenager in Oklahoma, all Danny Bowien wanted to do was be in a rock band. The James Beard Award-winning chef drove to the local Guitar Center in Oklahoma City to oogle guitars. Eventually an employee at the store invited him to be the bassist for her Christian rock band, the Stellas. One of their highest-profile shows was opening for the Flaming Lips at the Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots record party at a teppanyaki restaurant. (Bowien still keeps in touch with Wayne Coyne, who texts him pictures of his antics every now and then.) After the Stellas broke up, a friend in San Francisco invited Bowien to crash at his apartment and figure out what to do next. He decided to go to culinary school.

Bowien bounced around New York and San Francisco, picking up a Pesto World Championship along the way, before he started the first Mission Chinese Food in San Francisco with Anthony Myint. The operation was modest, sharing its space with a takeout Chinese food joint called Lung Shan, but it quickly became known for its audacious and densely flavored Sichuanese fusion cooking. Bowien eventually decamped to New York in 2012 to open up a new Mission Chinese in the Lower East Side. In their mostly rapturous review, the Times compared what Bowien does with Chinese food to what Led Zeppelin did with the blues. Other critics were quick to use the markers of punk rebellion and DIY to get a handle on the restaurant.

Before the original Mission Chinese was shut down by the health department in 2013, it had become something of a ritual for me: trek into the city for a show and have dinner there beforehand. After often waiting for hours, during which time the free keg beer they offered flowed freely, you were led to the ramshackle dining room through a narrow hallway, making it feel like you were walking into a secret. The space looked more like a vaguely tiki-tinged dive or a DIY club than one of the most decorated New York restaurants in recent memory, with a deeply lit energy to match. Then the food would arrive, its bold flavor combinations inspiring something close to hallucination. Looking back now, I think Mission Chinese and venues like 285 Kent or Glasslands occupied the same cultural space for me, in that they informed my taste and my idea of pure fun in more ways than I can explain.

In the two years it took to find a new location for Mission Chinese, Bowien opened up a Mexican place called Mission Cantina, co-wrote an excellent cook book, and started a band with Geoff Rickly (of Thursday) and Chris Conley (of Saves the Day) named NARX. The group followed Bowien on his book tour last year, playing rough and tumble punk in vaunted fine restaurants. Though he spends more time in the kitchen than behind the drum kit, music is, in one way or another, often orbiting Bowien. When we meet at Mission Cantina before dinner service, the staff is blasting Rihanna’s “Work” as they catch their breath before the rush. As we say our goodbyes, Bowien was rushing out the door to surprise his wife with tickets to Radiohead’s show at Madison Square Garden that night.

Pitchfork: How did NARX start?

Danny Bowien: That's a crazy story. Four or five years ago, I met Geoff [Rickly] at the first Mission Chinese in New York. At the time I thought that he was the lead singer of that band Girls, Chris Owens. So when he walked in I gave him a hug. He was really nice, and I'm sure at that point, Geoff was used to that. After he ate, he asked me to come to this show. We went around the corner to Pianos and I realized on the walk over that he was not my friend Chris, this was someone I did not know. Then I realized, “Oh shit, this is Geoff Rickly,” when other people from Thursday showed up. I played it off, I didn't say anything. We ended up partying all night.

Fast forward to Mission Chinese closing. I was really depressed for a long time and had nowhere else to go. At that point Geoff was like, “I know you love Saves the Day,” so I went out to Jersey with him where Saves was playing a show and met Chris [Conley, Saves the Day frontman]. It was very healing. Before we opened the new Mission Chinese, Geoff, Chris, and I were sitting at a booth just hanging out when they were like, “Oh man, we should start a band together.” I'm sitting there with two guys who I honestly grew up listening to their music, and I was just like, “Yeah, I play drums if you guys want to play.”

When did you guys start playing shows together?

When the book tour was coming up, I was like, “Hey, does NARX want to play shows?” After that, they started texting lyrics on our chat thread, and Chris was sending over demos that he'd been putting together. Geoff and I tried to practice together—and we did, but we were like, “Fuck it, let's just play.” Our first show was the Mission Chinese Lunar New Year, and we never practiced, and that's kind of how all our shows have been. We've done crazy shit. We played Bon Appetit’s test kitchen in the World Trade Center. We're getting some pretty serious offers, though. Saves is playing the FYF Fest in LA so Geoff and I are planning on flying out there to play little afterparties.

Do you think NARX will make an album at some point?

We talked about it and it became kind of difficult because it was like, What producer are we gonna use? Where are we gonna record? It got to a point where it started feeling like work for those guys. The whole idea with NARX is that it's his thrown together thing and it's very DIY, so why don't we just make bootlegs for our first album?

Besides Thursday and Saves the Day, what else did you listen to growing up?

I was really into grunge. In seventh grade I loved Offspring, Green Day, early Weezer, and Foo Fighters. The Smashing Pumpkins were probably one of my most influential bands. I remember when I first lived in New York, I was 21, and I was on St. Marks when I saw James Iha walking across the street. I remember exactly what happened, I was so nervous. I was wearing a Skid Row t-shirt at the time; I said hi and he was like, “Nice shirt.” Then I said, “Thanks, you influenced my entire musical life, just so you know.” Although, it's hard when you're talking about music because everyone has opinions, just like with food. I could also talk about my favorite restaurant in the alleyway of Chengdu, but that doesn't really help people who are looking for something. It’s about what’s tangible and legit in my reach.

Do you remember the first album you ever bought?

Van Halen’s Greatest Hits. I was in sixth or seventh grade and I had just started playing drums and guitar. I bought it with a gift certificate from Best Buy, which is right next to the Guitar Center. I also got an MxPx album because my mom was Christian and didn't want me to buy secular music. I snuck the Van Halen. I remember putting on “Eruption” for the first time and it was so crazy to me as a 12-year-old kid. Then I bought Metallica’s Justice for All, my third CD ever.

What are you listening to right now?

I'm listening to my friend Nico’s band Never Young. I listen to Power Trip a lot. Power Trip is one of these bands that I met through Geoff. I saw them open for Deafheaven, who I also listen to a lot. I was just floored. It felt so organic, and they were just shredding. Other stuff like educational videos my son watches, those songs get really stuck in my head. ANTI is really crazy, it's one of those albums that I think is timeless. It resonates, it doesn't get old—that’s what you want out of good pop music.

Has there ever been a time that music—whether listening to a band or going to a show—changed the way you or your chefs cook?

A few years ago I went to go see a Nine Inch Nails show at the Barclays Center with my head chef Angela. Just seeing people perform at that level is insane. For two and half hours, musically, never skipped a beat. It really changed a lot of the ideas about how we were gonna run the new Mission Chinese Food when we reopened—how the space was going to be laid out. She got an idea for the beef jerky fried rice that we do after the show. We walked out of the arena and she was like, “I just had this crazy idea.” It sounds nerdy, but it really was so informative—because you're taking yourself out of the kitchen. You're just reading books about food all of the time, you're going to have a certain perspective, but then you go to this other medium and it blows your mind.

What do you think connects the act of cooking and playing music?

There are a lot of variables involved when it comes to live music. What's the room like? What are the acoustics? Who’s running sound? All that stuff is the same in cooking, in a way. You can make a dish and it can be off-beat. It can get fussy if you're cooking with a wok with a lot of heat. Or dough, for example, is going to vary day to day depending on how hot it is. I think that music to someone like Trent Reznor is similar to what I'm trying to get at as a chef: a sustainable point where it's very consistent, where they walk away like, “Damn, that was insane.” That's very difficult to do on a night to night basis. Playing music is just as impossible, but if you can do it—if you're good at it, and it's really your craft, and you care—it can change people's lives.